May Chauvinist

I know I'm a May (as opposed  to male) chauvinist, but really, what's not to like about this month?

The climbing rose is blooming its heart out. The Big Heat is just getting warmed up (though it's early this year, will be 95 here today). And the air is scented with honeysuckle flower.

Schools are letting out, vacations are beginning, days are long and languid. 

I'm grateful to be embarking upon another trip around the sun today. I just snuck into May ... but I'm glad I did. 

Memorial Day x 2

Today, Memorial Day falls on Memorial Day — May 30, that is. Perhaps it is doubly Memorial Day, then, Memorial Day x 2. 

I looked for photos of Washington, D.C., to celebrate the occasion and came up with these from a nighttime visit to the monuments with work colleagues in October of 2018. 

Notice how the emblems of our democracy shine out as darkness surrounds them. Perhaps a fitting metaphor for this day, this year. 

Basement Time

I spent some time in the basement today, following the advice of my phone, which was blasting a shrill tone and notifying me of a tornado warning in my neighborhood. 

The skies have been unsettled, and the warm humid air made me think there was some cause for concern, so I scampered downstairs and used the elliptical until the warning passed and I could come upstairs again.

Though my experience of tornados has been limited (some close calls plus a terrifying derecho),  I generally hop to it when a windstorm is said to be in the neighborhood. 

My basement is not a paradise, but it is, well, below ground. 

The Spider Web

One of my final projects for class last semester required making an object. It could be a collage or a photograph or a batch of banana bread, but it had to be something tangible that represented a lesson we had learned or a question we had asked. I crocheted the spider web you see above. Here, in part, is how I explained my choice:

Delicate yet strong, filmy yet adhesive, the filaments of a spider web are both a prism and a killing field. They bend light, make rainbows, reveal themselves from some angles and not others. Humans find them beautiful; insects find them deadly.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino chose the spider web to portray one of his most memorable metropolises: Octavia, a city stretched across a void, made of “ropes and chains and catwalks.” Its inhabitants “know the net will only last so long.” The spider web seemed an apt metaphor for this class; it represents all the impermanent structures we build to make meaning, knowing, even as we construct them, that they are doomed to fall.

I talked about how the class readings were "knotty but precious," and how the entire project was "deconstructionist" in nature since I frequently found myself ripping out stitches. I ended by mentioning that the word “crochet” comes from the French croche, to hook. I interpreted this “hook” not as a spear but as a net, a way to catch an idea, examine it, then let it go — not pin it down. I'd like to do more of that.

On Midwives and Texas

In my mind now are snippets of the music played in "Call the Midwife." Not just the opening tune, but the crescendo that signals a baby is about to be born, the whimsical notes that accompany Fred the handyman, and the ecclesiastical chords that sound whenever the nuns gather to pray.

All of this suggests that I watch a little too much "Call the Midwife" — and on that point I plead guilty — but there’s a reason why I do. And it’s worth mentioning on this day we’re all grieving the tragic loss of life in Texas.

"Call the Midwife" takes place in the East End of London in the 1960s. Watching it whisks me into a completely different world from the one I inhabit. It’s a world of poverty, to be sure, but also a world of community. It is not a world without violence but it’s a world where police are armed only with billy clubs and the only children who die are rare ones who, despite the best efforts of the midwives and doctors, do not survive a difficult birth. 

I started re-watching the show a few weeks ago when I was feeling under the weather because it never fails to buoy me up. And you can bet I watched an episode last night to calm myself down. The show distracted me from the thoughts swirling around in my mind so I could fall asleep. But now it's morning and the thoughts are back:

When will we do something about the gun violence in this country? Whatever it is, it won’t be enough. But it will be a start. And without it ... well, I just don’t know what will become of us.

Resilience

In her new book Sanctuary, Emily Rapp Black explores the concept of resilience. As part of this task, she talks with the editor of a book called Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust.

Black learns that resilience is not an item on a to-do list. It is a part of us, as long as we have the agency to express it.

The children whose diaries are featured in this book found that agency through keeping their diaries. "The journal writers made it clear that writing was the path to maintaining any agency at all, which in this context was life," Black writes. "To do creative work was to be — and feel — alive."

The children who kept these diaries were exposed to unimaginable horrors. Yet they found the will to live through scribbling words on a page. I take great hope from that.

Music and Writing

There was a time in my life when writing and music were neck and neck. I loved to write and loved to play piano, and, for a brief and shining time, I loved being a member of a youth orchestra, even though it meant learning to harrumph my way through the string bass parts of Brahms' First Symphony, the Leonore Overture and other pieces I can still remember even though I played them decades ago.

In the end it came down to this: I could make a living as a writer but not as a musician, and wanting a roof over my head and clothes on my back I made what I think was the wiser choice. But music was always out there, a grand passion, and lately, with the new piano, a more fully engaged one.

What has occurred to me recently is how well the two go together. How music takes over when words fail. How words crystallize the feelings that music engenders, how in my re-engineered life, music and writing can work together. They can and, I hope, they do.

 

Exposed

Walking early today because it will be too hot to tromp around later, I took a different route out my front door, turning right at the corner instead of left. Then, at the next corner, choosing a path that runs along a four-lane road. 

It's one of my semi-regular walks, but I hadn't taken it in a while, so I noticed how pine boughs crowd the sidewalk, how fast cars speed along beside the path, how close together are road and sidewalk. 

How exposed I suddenly felt! For after all, what is a mere walker when confronted with tons of speeding steel? 

(I realize I don't take too many photos of cars on highways. I'm much more likely to snap bucolic shots like the one above.)

  

Fleeting

I'd forgotten there were lilies of the valley in the side yard, so running into them last week was a surprise and a delight. There were those delicate, bell-like flowers; there the white against the green.

I marveled, I stooped down and snapped a few photos, then I promptly moved on to something else: weeds to pull, chores to do.

Day before yesterday, I thought I would go and look at the flowers again. Surely they would still be blooming. But no, they were not. 

The day I'd glimpsed them was one of their few on earth. How fleeting was their time here! How glad I am to have caught them when I did. 

A Pencil Post

I'm thinking this morning of the pencil. The pencil I first used as a young school girl. A pencil fat and soft-leaded, a purgatory in which I would need to exist until I graduated to a cartridge pen. 

The humble pencil, which author Wendell Berry uses for correspondence, saying that he no longer has the courage to write unless he can erase. (Berry long ago eschewed the computer, which does pretty well in the erasure department, sometimes when you least expect or want it to.) 

The historical pencil, produced in a factory in Concord, Massachusetts, owned by the father of Henry David Thoreau. 

The mechanical pencil, which is not my writing implement of choice but is a dandy tool for making notes to myself in a calendar, especially if it has a good eraser.

The pencil, in short, has much to recommend itself, and is certainly worth a post—though not, of course, a penciled one. 

Walking Early

I often have a little debate with myself in the morning: should I walk first or should I write? I'll do both eventually, of course. They are the warp and woof of my day. Twenty-four hours without them is barely a day at all. 

But there remains the order. To walk early is to give the body precedence when the mind is sharpest. To write early is to miss the coolest and most pleasant hours of the day. 

Today, walking raised its hand, waved it in front of my face. Choose me, choose me, it said. 

And so ... I did.

The Rhododendrons

Every year is some plant's year to shine. Last year the redbuds stole the show. Or at least the ones I saw were resplendent in their budding show of strength, their pinks and purples peeking out from amidst sprays of dogwood white.

This year, it's the rhododendrons' turn to shine. Whether it's just that I'm noticing them more or that certain meteorological conditions are favoring them I'll never understand, inexpert gardener that I am. 

All I know is that our own specimen aside (and it has its hands full thriving in the midst of a bamboo patch), other area plants are standing up to rain and wind and alternate blasts of warmth and cold. They are sending us big-fisted flowers that remind us, as do their compatriots, of how much we need spring. 

(I cheated a bit with the photo: it's from last year's May trip to Seattle. I know of no Virginia plants that look like this.)

Golden

It's an idea they had for 10 years and it wouldn't let them go. A trove of family papers they inherited. It's a question, a notion, a curiosity. 

Over the weekend I hung out with 150 writers. And though I spoke with only a fraction of them, the conversations were all struck through with the same bright threads of humor, determination and yearning. 

We're a greedy bunch, we writers. If we don't have an idea, we want one. If we have the idea we must have the time and space to explore it: to research, write and revise. 

Of course, if we have the finished manuscript we need the agent. And if we have the agent, we need the publisher. 

But when the stars align, when we have the idea, the time, the space, the words, the agent, the publisher .... ah, then life is golden indeed. 

The Woodsman

Like Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone is part legend, and many of the images we have of him are false. He did not wear a coonskin cap, did not discover Cumberland Gap and was not the first settler to arrive in Kentucky. 

But he did guide many through the Gap and he, more than anyone else, helped settle the Bluegrass State. In fact, one of the chief ironies of Boone's life (1734-1820) is that he, more than anyone else, helped ruin the wilderness he loved. 

The Daniel Boone that emerges from Robert Morgan's biography is a bright, humble, kind man, a woodsman more at home in the forest than anywhere else and as sympathetic to Native Americans as most any of his generation. 

Often in debt, Boone learned the hard way that his personality was better suited to the edges of civilization than to its midst. But not before he may have had this realization, Morgan writes: 

By 1788 the irony could not have been lost on Boone that he, as much as any other single human being, had helped create the world that was now repugnant to him, so raging and relentless in growth and greed. And he must have seen, perhaps for the first time, the contradiction and conflict at the heart of so much of his effort: to lead white people into the wilderness and make it safe for them was to destroy the very object of his quest.

(Boone's first view of Kentucky by William Tylee Ranney, 1849, courtesy Wikipedia) 

Dad's Day

Dad would have been 99 today. It's not a stretch to imagine such a birthday for him. He was almost 91 when he died. 

I'm not sure he would have cared for what this world has become in the eight years since he's been gone: harder, meaner, more confusing. And yet, Dad took his joy from family and friends, so I imagine he would have adjusted to the craziness. 

Because what's important is that he would have seen five granddaughters marry and four become mothers, would have held six (soon to be seven) great-grandchildren in his arms.  He would have relished the new generation, as he relished so much of life. 

But four-score-and-ten is not a shabby lifespan, and he was not complaining at the end. Only grateful for what he had.  As we all were for having him so long. 

(Dad clowning around, as he was wont to do.)

Breathing Space

There was, at one point, going to be a window seat here. There still might be. 

There was, at one point, a swag on these windows. And there might be again.

But for now, this is the most precious of spaces. An empty one. Sometimes I sit on the floor here with a pillow at my back and watch the dust motes in the air.  It's an empty space, a breathing space. 

So for now, there is nothing here. And there might never be.

Unplugged

While I would like to say I always walk bare-eared, open to the sounds of wind in the pines and birds on the bough, in truth I am usually plugged in, listening to music or a recorded book. 

Yesterday, I started out with one of these in mind, but as I began to amble along a forest path, I realized that I couldn't pollute my ears. The only sounds that should enter them on such a pristine spring morning should be the sounds the morning itself produced.

It was a calm, quiet, meditative experience. I'm doing it again today. 

80-1 ... 91-1

When I wrote Saturday's post, which only alluded to the Derby, I didn't know what a Derby it would be. Didn't know that friends and family would be calling and texting to share their amazement. Didn't know that Rich Strike, the horse with the second-longest odds ever, would win the race. 

What I had forgotten until my brother reminded me yesterday was that the horse who won with the longest odds ever was Donerail, 91-1, named for Donerail Station in Scott County, Kentucky. It's a horse I've heard about since I was a child, a horse Mom would have bet on, for sure, if only she had been alive and of betting age at the time (1913). 

As the descendants of both Donnellys and Scotts, as the proud daughter of a long-shot bettor, as a fan of hopeless causes everywhere, Rich Strike, I salute you!

The Meadow Land

It's the first Saturday in May, the one day of the year when Kentucky takes center stage in the sporting world. But this first Saturday in May I'm thinking of a different sort of Kentucky and Kentuckian. I'm knee-deep into Boone: A Biography by Robert Morgan. 

I've been learning a lot about my home state. For instance, the name doesn't necessarily mean "dark and bloody ground." It could be Shawnee for "at the head of the river." Or Wyandotte for "the land of tomorrow." Or Iroquois for "the meadow land"—kenta (level) and aki (place).  

That one makes the most sense: it captures the open savannah for which the Bluegrass region is known. 

But whatever the origin, Morgan says, "some words have a resonance, a color, and are memorable even before we know what they mean. We love to say them just to feel them in the air and on our tongue."

Amen, Mr. Morgan. 

The Details

Being under the weather, as I have been this week, helps me appreciate the details. I woke up thirsty this morning and have been enjoying sips of cold, clear water as I answer emails and read the paper. 

Having a comfy couch or chair on which to recline as I do these things ... that's another detail to enjoy. As are the rhododendrons that bloomed while I wasn't looking.

It's no secret that being restricted narrows the lens, helps us focus on what we still have.  I'm trying to let this flu bug do that for me. 

A Trip to D.C.

A few days ago I met a friend for lunch in D.C. I parked in the Union Station garage and made my way past the old neighborhood: New Jersey and 1st Avenue, along E Street to the National Building Museum, where I stole a glance at those stunning columns. 

From there to Chinatown, bustling again, though with way too many boarded-up stores. The restaurant we chose was still in business, though, and lively, to boot.

After that, a stroll down the Mall and over to the Botanic Garden and a cool outdoor exhibit/structure made of brush, a human-sized nest that kids were running in and out of. 

I love the views of the Capitol you get from the Garden. It humanizes and softens the building, makes it seem more a part of the landscape. Which, of course, it certainly is.

Calm after the Storm

We were pelted overnight by some much-needed rain. I could hear it beating the earth, could imagine it puddling on the driveway and in the low spots of the front yard. 

This morning the world looks fresh and clean. The azaleas are greening, shedding their brilliant jewel-toned flowers and becoming the sedate shrubs they are for most of the year. 

It's a quiet, still day so far, the calm after the storm. Which at this point is ... most welcome. 

Tallying...

Over the weekend, a milestone: it's been a year since I started this new life. The temptation is to tally up the "accomplishments," to see if I've earned this freedom. 

But the "freedom" is already teaching me not to add up accomplishments, to see that as exactly the sort of mindset I was trying to escape. 

Instead, I'm remembering the farewell message I sent my colleagues in April of 2021. I told them that I was leaving to "write, study and travel." And lo and behold, writing, studying and traveling is exactly what I've been doing. 

So the only tallying I'm doing today is ... the counting of blessings.